


The Wizard of Mumbles

by Sarielle



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 1950s, Coming of Age, Gen, Guardian Angels, If by character you mean beloved welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Jewish Crowley (Good Omens), Magic, Nostalgia, POV Outsider, Poetry, Softness, Trans Male Character, Wales, pining aziraphale, wistfulness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 12:57:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19906087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarielle/pseuds/Sarielle
Summary: He was a kid in the Home, when Dylan first heard the kids talking about the Wizard of the Mumbles. He was supposed to live down by the beach and runaways or reckless adventurers who strayed too close to his little cliff side cottage would always find themselves again outside the school gates with an ice cream in their hand or a soft hand-knitted scarf around their necks in winter.Crowley and Aziraphale spend some time apart in the 1950s. Aziraphale is rather fond of Wales.





	The Wizard of Mumbles

**Author's Note:**

> The Sunset Poem/Eli Jenkins's Prayer is originally from Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (1954) by Dylan Thomas  
> Copyright Belongs to the Thomas' Estate.
> 
> I wrote this full of gay yearning at 2am and I just think Dylan Thomas is neat. Mumbles (Mwmbwls in Cymraeg) is a little seaside village/hamlet just outside of Swansea where my grandmother lived for the last five or six years of her life and it has a very dear place in my heart and arguably Joe's does the best ice cream in the entire world I would not be surprised if angelic beings were involved in it's production. Also my mother, being a radio dj kind of person used to read Under Milk Wood to me as a baby doing all the voices which uh explains a lot about me really.
> 
> Love and Thanks as always to the Good Omensch server, this one isn't specifically Jewish enough for the Collection but everything I write is Jewish by virtue of me writing.  
> -Yael

_Mumbles, January 1956_  
  
He was a kid in the Home, when Dylan first heard the kids talking about the Wizard of the Mumbles. He was supposed to live down by the beach and runaways or reckless adventurers who strayed too close to his little cliffside cottage would always find themselves again outside the school gates with an ice cream in their hand or a soft hand-knitted scarf around their necks in winter.  
  
Carys still had her scarf, it was pink and white striped made from chunky hand spun wool, “It was the first time someone had ever given me something that was just for me.” She’d told him. Dylan didn’t ask her to elaborate he already understood.  
  
None of the the adults took the stories seriously and as kids grew older and started to age out so did they age out of the Wizard of the Mumbles.  
  
But Dylan was seventeen, he was only months away from aging out and losing everything he knew of in the world. Exchanging lives like library books for something new and open ended and terrifying.  
  
He didn’t have much here as it was. He had complex relationships with the other kids that wasn’t quite the same as a family. He still had Carys though. She was just over a year younger than him. That was more than something.  
  
Just an orphan kid with little skills to speak off too boyish and rough to get a respectable young lady’s job as a secretary or receptionist like his foster sisters had and too soft and young looking to try his hand at a trade like his foster brothers might.

Now he could add loitering and showing up unannounced to his charming list of habits, as he waltzed on up to the Wizard's cottage one gloomy, wintry afternoon, having successfully palmed off dinner-duty on Rhiannon in exchange for covering her morning dishes for the next week while she went off wherever with her fancy new electrician boyfriend who had a car and a driver's license.

A man inside the house, caught eye of him just standing there like a complete pillock, and smiling kindly he opened the front door.

"Yes? Can I help you?" he said, still smiling. Despite the fact that Dylan was a strange interloping teenager standing slack-jawed on his doorstep which was reasonably suspicious even by Dylan's own surmising. 

“Are you him then?” Said Dylan, who really had not been thinking any of this through.  
  
The man looked around surprised Dylan was actually addressing him and not otherwise mistaken.  
  
“I am _a_ him? To who are you referring, young man?” He asked.  
  
Dylan looked askance. He felt stupid this whole thing was stupid but the Wizard called him young man, and he wasn’t sure how to process that. Most of the locals knew of him as his birth name, or ‘that scrappy little tomboy from the Home’.  
  
“Um, the one they call the wizard of the Mumbles, aren’t you?”  
  
“A wizard?” The man laughed, his accent was posh and English on the surface but there was a lilt, a subtle lyrical intonation, a pitch in accent that implied a Welsh-speaking undercurrent. “They may call me that yes but I believe it’s just a charming little pseudonym of sorts, no wizarding order worth any salt would let a silly old fruit like me in, I certainly haven’t the beard.”  
  
Dylan smiled back weakly “Yeah, Me neither.”  
  
“What do they call you then?” the man asked softly.  
  
Everything about him was soft, from his fair hair like a crown of feathers on his head to the lines in the corners of his eyes from years of smiling.  
  
“My name is Dylan but no one really calls me that...” he murmured not wanting get into dangerous details.  
  
Two white-blond brows rose slowly up the Wizard’s kindly face.  
  
“Dylan? But why not? that’s a fine name.”

He smiled once more but it was tinged with something else, a brief flicker of melancholy shined in his eyes.  
  
“A very dear friend of mine was called Dylan. He died quite recently. I often think of him, when I come to the beach here.”  
  
“I’m sorry... for your loss.” Dylan said a little awkwardly.

The other man didn’t seem to mind, he just kept on smiling. “Thank you, Dylan. Such is life.”  
  
The Wizard said his name with the fondest Welsh lilt. Most people, if they knew Dylan’s boy name at all, said it with a short i sound like the more common Anglicised version. _Dillun._  
  
The Wizard was the first person who’d addressed him with his correct name pronounced correctly in Welsh. It rolled off his tongue _Dul-lan_ ; like an ancient spell.  
  
The same language he remembered his mother in, from before the War and the Home.  
  
“It wasn’t the name my Mam gave me let’s just leave it at that.” He said.  
  
The Wizard shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be. Some people are given their names, others need to go out and get them themselves. At the end of the day you’re still Dylan.”  
  
“I’m glad someone else agrees with me for once.” He said. “That’s not the usual response I get.”

“Well, if you don’t mind telling me, What brings you here Dylan?”

“I don’t know: Boredom, curiosity, avoiding the Home as long as I can?”

“And which home is that exactly? Yours?”

Dylan sighed. “It’s called the Swansea Maritime Children’s Home It’s just the old Seaman’s Orphanage really. But Matron gets pissy with us if we use the O-word. Which is stupid because most of us are orphans and it’s not like we haven’t noticed. I don’t see the point in lying about it.”  
  
“You don’t look like a child to me. If you don’t mind me saying so.”  
  
That wasn’t a common opinion either, if a stranger read Dylan as male they usually placed him around thirteen or fourteen.  
  
“That may be so but for now I’m seventeen, I'm still a minor. I age out of here in August.”  
  
"Where are you going to go after that?” the Wizard asked.  
  
“Probably the city. I don’t know. Mam left me a tidy bit of money, I mean it’s not a fortune, but enough to pay a deposit on a flat maybe get some new clothes. Dunno what I’m going to do there. Try to survive, I suppose?”  
  
The man smiled softly, “That’s all everyone is trying to do, Dylan. I wouldn’t push yourself too hard when you’re just staring out. Is there something in particular I can help you with?”  
  
“No I don’t think so. I really did come here just out of curiosity, You gave my sister a scarf a couple of years ago, didn’t you? I mean, it’s just you’re a bit of a local legend.”  
  
The Wizard chortled at that. “Oho, really! I give away lots of scarves, I’m only one man so I’ve only the one neck. Seems selfish to hoard them. When was that exactly?”  
  
Dylan shrugged. “I don’t know five or six years ago? She got separated from the others playing on the beach one winter and cut her foot on a mussel shell. Her name’s Carys Owens. She’s a feral wee thing.”  
  
“I remember her. Pink and white stripes? With a white fringe?”  
  
“Yes that’s the one! She still has it!” Dylan nodded with enthusiasm.  
  
“Well, I’m glad it went to a happy home.”  
  
Dylan chuckled dryly. “It’s not a happy home though, is it? No, not by any description but you made it happier even just for a moment every kid who tried to run away or wandered off in the winter time ended up safe back at home or school again which is good enough...”He smiled to himself. “But for them to return happier than the left? That’s not far shy of a miracle, that’s why they call you the wizard, I think. The kids think it’s magic.”  
  
Something about that made the Wizard frown and shrug. “It’s just knitting and a sympathetic ear. It’s not going to fix their lives it’s not going to stop there ever being orphans.”  
  
“No, but take it from me, as someone on the other side. It’s enough. Most of us are grasping for something anything to use to fight back with. You either fight or you freeze and give up in that place you don’t have a family and you rarely have a friend who wouldn’t stab you in the back for an extra dinner roll.”  
  
“Would you like a cup of tea?” the Wizard asked,   
  
Dylan hesitated, Matron's droning voice in his head warning him about bothering strangers. “I’m the one intruding here, you don’t need to do that.”  
  
"It’s about to rain any minute, is all, and I never get to have visitors. Besides I wouldn’t want to cause you to catch a cold especially when you live with the other children so close together.”  
  
“Well, then. A cup of tea would be nice thank you, Mr-" He stopped mid-sentence. "Oh Sweet Christ-uh _Christmas_ , Never even asked you your name, did I? just charged in called you a wizard and vented about my life story, I’m sorry that’s rude of me.”  
  
“I quite like the epithet. It’s much more mysterious than I really am. But since you asked, my _human_ name is Ezra, Ezra Fell.”  
  
Dylan smiled at the dig and stuck out his hand, the older man shook it. His hands were calloused but his handshake was as gentle as the rest of him.

* * *

  
"Do you live here alone?" Dylan asked, seated in the Wizard's cliff-side cottage, nursing a hot cup of tea and a box of shortbread biscuits.   
  
“Currently yes. I came here a while back with...a friend of mine, a very dear friend.”  
  
Ezra sighed and there was something different about his mannerisms. He looked a lot older all of a sudden and his face was notably more lined.  
  
“Was that um Dylan? Your friend you mentioned before?” he asked.  
  
“Oh No, no. I hadn’t seen my Dylan since the war ended. We last met up in London, his wife had just had a little girl. She must be about ten now, Aeronwy. He’d been travelling you see? He was actually in America when he fell ill... no this friend is very much still alive.”  
  
“Sorry, if that was rude of me to ask.”  
  
“No not at all it’s a reasonable conclusion to draw. But Crowley, he’s fine as far as I know it’s just he’s...from London, you see? the silence, the people, the sea it was all, much too slow for him he was just wound himself in to knots here.”  
  
“I know the feeling.” he said drily  
  
“I don’t think that man has stopped doing and being everything at once since the war began. He’s exhausted. What he really needs is some proper sleep and fresh air, somewhere actually quiet.”  
  
“Well Mumbles is a good choice. That’s like the one thing living here is actually any good for.”  
  
“I know, it’s peaceful. I just thought, I love it here. I used to come and stay summers near here with Dylan and Caitlin. It makes me feel so at peace I wish Crow-my friend, could feel that too. But well, he’s a busy man.”  
  
Dylan nodded, nibbling on his shortbread.  
  
“Evidently.” he said.  
  
"He’s been talking about healing the world a lot lately, He's Jewish and it’s a Hebrew phrase _Tikkun Olam_. I mean after the war, I can hardly disagree but, I do worry- if he can’t even stop long enough to admire the world, hows he ever going to figure out what to heal? How does he manage to still see the goodness in man, if he can’t see the goodness inherent in a Swansea sunset?"  
  
Dylan looked out the panel windows, at the grey sheets of rain falling along the beach, the sands a similarly drab grey as the wild caps of the seas. The wind was audible, howling in the cracks of the doors.  
  
Ezra caught him looking and smiled again. “Just because you can’t see it now doesn’t me it isn’t there.”  
  
"I guess..." Dylan mumbled “Hey um Mr Fell can I ask a stupid question?”  
  
“I’ve been told on good authority that there’s no such thing, Dylan.”  
  
"Why do you make us scarves? Or buy us ice cream, send us safely home, how does it help you? You don’t know us from Adam"  
  
"I do actually, Adam was a friend of mine too. As for your question, it’s just the right thing to do dear boy"  
  
"How do you know?" He asked.  
  
The Wizard, or Ezra Fell, rather, frowned. "I don’t understand the question?"  
  
Dylan gesticulated vaguely in the air which helped no one. Mr Fell sipped his tea, waiting politely for these gestures to form coherent words. 

"How do you know when something is the right thing to do?" Dylan asked finally. "For all you know you could be sending those kids back to a lifetime of abuse, and I don’t know maybe there’s a kid who gets really sick from the ice cream or is I don’t know allergic to wool?"

"Was there any?" in true Wizard form, the other man replied to his question with another, slightly pettier question.

"Well, no... But you have no way of knowing that!. You know the saying- the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

"Yes, a funny misconception that one, the road to hell, isn't paved at all it's gravel." The man shook his head,"Never mind that. Dylan, what are you really asking me about here?"  
  
"I’m leaving in August..." He began, setting his tea cup down on the table and resting his face in his hands.  
  
Mr Fell nodded jauntily. “Yes, yes, for Swansea proper, you said already.”  
  
“I’m leaving everything I know. The little ones who look up to me, Carys my sister and my best friend, Mumbles, the beach. Is that the right thing to do?”  
  
The man paused an cocked his head like some kind of snowy owl. "Do you have other choices? I can’t tell you your own business. They have beaches in Swansea and it’s not like the children will be completely unchaperoned."  
  
Dylan sighed in frustration and shook his head. “Well no, but I’m leaving them, I’m leaving them like our parents left us. Doesn’t that make me just as bad?”  
  
"Dylan..." Ezra said and he paused giving him the kindest softest look before he closed his eyes to recite something in a lilting voice.  
  
_“We are not wholly bad or good_  
_Who live our lives under Milk Wood,_  
_And Thou, I know, wilt be the first_  
_To see our best side, not our worst.”_  
  
Dylan blinked for several seconds unsure if he had finished.  
  
“What’s that, some kind of poem?” he asked.  
  
“Yes, of sorts. It’s from a radio play called Under Milk Wood, perhaps you can look it up in the library when you get to Swansea.”  
  
"Okay? Wait, that was you telling me to go, was it then?” He asked, rubbing his temples. This man was friendly and kind and _very_ hard to follow.  
  
“I can’t make your decisions for you, dear boy, I’m just a simple wizard, I can give you one thing however.”  
  
He rose from the table and disappeared into the back room. When he returned it was with a thick speckled scarf a rich teal wool flecked with white like the spray of sea foam.  
  
“Keep yourself warm, Dylan, you’re no good to anyone if you die out there in the cold.”  
  
“Thank you, Mr Fell, sir.” he murmured, running his fingers over the wool.   
  
“Invest in a good letter writing quill, keep in touch with your sister and for the sake of the Almighty, Dylan stay away from the drink whatever you do.”  
  
He nodded awkwardly, a shadow had crossed over the the friendly man's face just momentarily. “Uh, okay? I’ll bear that in mind.”  
  
Mr Fell nodded, and once more closed his eyes preparing to recite.

 _“O let us see another day!_  
_Bless us all this night, I pray,_  
_And to the sun we all will bow_  
_And say, good-bye – but just for now!”_  
  
Dylan smiled lopsided, at the strange man. “Goodbye, Mr Wizard of Mumbles.”  
  
Ezra Fell chuckled richly. “Goodbye Master Dylan of the Home. Safe Travels.”  
  


* * *

_Swansea, November 1956._

  
“I’ll call you later tonight when I get home from work, okay?” Dylan said cradling the phone between his shoulder and ear as he quickly packed his bag, and donned his outer layers. 

_Jumper. Coat. Hat. The Wizard's Scarf._  
  
His sister yawned into the receiver. “Kay, have a good one yeah?”  
  
“Yeah, Carys, I will. You stay warm.”  
  
“You too, hope the library has good central heating it’s freezing out here.”  
  
Dylan glanced out the window of his flat, the rain was bordering on sleet and the wind was screaming something terrible.

“Hopefully Jeanie’s in already, she’ll have put the radiator on, from my window it looks like there’s a traffic jam the whole breadth of the town.” He said, searching in his coat pockets for his gloves and house keys.  
  
“Just as well you're in walking distance, huh?” Carys murmured. "Nearly froze my tits clean off walking up the hill from the bus stop. Mind you, you might like that idea."  
  
He laughed down the phone line. “Haven't let myself get that desperate yet. Hey, I really oughta go, I’ll talk to you later?”  
  
“Will do, Dylan. I miss you.”  
  
“I know but it won’t be long now, lovely. I’ll see you soon” he said and hung up the phone. 

* * *

A man was patiently waiting by the front desk when Dylan reached the library. 

The front doors were open and unlocked, but Jeanie and Dai who were supposed to be opening were nowhere in sight.

He was wiry and thin with a black scarf and winter’s coat he wore small rounded dark glasses. He smiled at Dylan when he quickly made his way behind the desk.

"I'm sorry, sir, my coworkers must be busy upstairs or in the back, can I be of any help?" he asked,

Glasses man nodded and smiled. “Yes, young man, I just wanted to return this book, ever so quickly.”  
  
“Sure thing just pop it on the desk there and I’ll get to it as soon as possible.”  
  
“Thanks have a nice day.”  
  
“You too, sir. Watch the weather out there.”  
  
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the man walk to the door and talk to another soft familiar figure dressed in layers of green and beige. Ezra Fell the Wizard of Mumbles.  
  
When he looked up again the man and the Wizard were both gone. Shaking his head Dylan picked up the book the stranger had dropped off to return.  
  
The author and title caused his heart to skip a beat in sheer surprise. He smiled to himself and hugged his scarf more tightly around his neck.  
  
_‘Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices by Dylan Thomas.’_


End file.
